Prim. Dr. Herbert Stekel, MD, from the General Hospital Linz (AKH Linz) was so kind to organize the last consortium meeting before the summer. Shortly before 3:00 p.m. the Heureka! project consortium met in front of the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), which is also one of the most important sights in Linz. Gerfried Stocker, CEO and artistic director of the AEC, surprised us with an exclusive and exciting tour through his "Museum of the Future", followed by presentations and a buffet in the Sky Media Loft. In detail, Heureka! researchers presented results on the following topics:

1. Research group head Michael Affenzeller talked about the interim evaluation of Heureka! and briefly sketched the most important accomplishments of the center in the last 1.5 project years.
2. Stefan Wagner talked about the HeuristicLab 3.3 release and gave a live demo of our greatly improved software framework. You can get more information about the framework on the HeuristicLab Develeopment Homepage.
3. Finally, students from FH OOE presented the results of their study project about medical data analysis in cooperation with AKH Linz.

Michael Affenzeller would like to thank AKH Linz for hosting the meeting and all consortium members for attending!

We recently had a film team in Hagenberg for a short portrait about our work in Heureka! The resulting film was presented at the 4th Science Symposium of Austrian Universities for Applied Sciences in Pinkafeld, Burgenland and very well received.

We are proud to announce that team HEAL achieved the first place at the symbolic regression competition of the EvoCompetitions side event of Evo* 2010. The goal of the competition was to create a prediction-model for a variable that is expensive to measure based on 57 other variables that can be easily measured based on data from a real world chemical process.

In the modeling process we tried to find a simple model that can be readily interpreted and validated by the domain experts. We put more emphasis on the interpretability, the prediction error of our final model is thus relatively large.

To generate the models for this competition we used an internal pre-release candidate of our software framework HeuristicLab that will be released real soon now. The fact that we achieved first place in this competiton and also second place in the financial time series competition shows that HeuristicLab is powerful and flexible enough to achieve competitive results for real world applications with minimal preparation effort.

Finally we would like to thank the organizers of the symbolic regression competition and of the financial time series prediction competition for making the datasets available for reseach purposes and the EvoCompetitions chair Anna I Esparcia-Alcázar for the organization of the event.

voestalpine Stahl GmbH invited the Heureka! project consortium to Linz for a retrospection on the first year of the centre. The meeting commenced at 3:00 p.m. with an exciting tour of the voestalpine Stahlwelt exhibition, followed by presentations and a buffet. In detail, Heureka! researchers presented results on the following topics:

1. Research group head Michael Affenzeller summarized accomplishments of the first year and introduced the research branches.
2. Gabriel Kronberger presented new approaches for the evaluation of complex process models.
3. Stephan Winkler showed intermediate results on the analysis of medical data from clinical laboratory testing.
4. Finally, Monika Kofler gave an update on the progress in facility layout and warehouse optimization.

Michael Affenzeller would like to thank voestalpine for hosting the meeting and all attendees for their interest and insightful comments! Below are several pictures from the event.

Heureka researcher Andreas Beham is attending the Winter Simulation Conference 2009 in Austin, Texas this week. The Winter Simulation Conference is among the premier international conferences on system simulation and Andreas is using the opportunity to network with other researchers and to present recent research results on facility layout optimization .

The Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (FH OÖ) honors outstanding scientists and scholars actively engaged in research in an annual award ceremony. We are delighted to announce that two prizes went to our research team this year: Michael Affenzeller was awared first place in the category Researcher of the Year and Stefan Wagner received the Junior Researcher Award 2009 for their contributions to the field of heuristic and evolutionary optimization. Congratulations!

A review of our book ("Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming - Modern Concepts and Practical Applications") has been published in Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines. The reviewer, Gisele L. Pappa from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, points out that the book covers the basics of GA and GP for optimization and presents results of interesting research on new methods capable of preserving relevant building blocks; she also describes it as a good buy for students and researchers interested in genetic algorithms and their application in optimization problems! The full review is available online at SpringerLink.

Michael Affenzeller is today presenting the Ressel Centre for Heuristic Optimization Heureka! at the annual ÖGM Meeting in Graz, Austria.

Stephan Winkler is going to present the paper Heuristic Modeling of the Mental Progress of Persons with Normal Brain Aging, Subjective Cognitive Impairment, Mild Cognitive Impairment, Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementia Disorders at the 21st European Modeling und Simulation Symposium (EMSS 2009). The work presented is a joint contribution between Stephan Winkler and Michael Affenzeller from the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, Hagenberg, Austria, Stefanie Auer and Yvonne Donabauer from the M·A·S Alzheimerhilfe, Bad Ischl, Austria and Barry Reisberg from the Department of Psychiatry of the New York University Langone Medical Center, NY, USA.

The next international workshop on nature inspired distributed computing (NIDISC'2010) is being held during the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA from April 19-23, 2010. The workshop covers the following topics:

• Nature-inspired methods (e.g. ant colonies, GAs, cellular automata, DNA and molecular computing, local search, etc) for problem solving environments.
• Parallel and distributed metaheuristics techniques (algorithms, technologies and tools).
• Applications combining traditional parallel and distributed computing and optimization techniques as well as theoretical issues (convergence, complexity, etc).
• Other algorithms and applications relating the above mentioned research areas.

Interested researchers should refer to the NIDISC website and submit their contributions until December, 4th 2009.